


ON A HIATUS The Ocean On His Shoulders

by captainhurricane



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Bioshock AU, Depression, Hank is a mess, M/M, More tags to be added, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, inventor!Hank, ish, magical android!Connor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-10-13 23:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17497457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainhurricane/pseuds/captainhurricane
Summary: Hank, a down on his luck failed detective, tinkers in his workshop in hopes of keeping himself going for just one more day. When his greatest misery and his greatest creation vanishes, Hank descends under the sea to the mysterious city of Rapture.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> updates will be very very irregular so keep that in mind 
> 
> i just had to spit this out 
> 
> also don't worry you don't have to know anything about the Bioshock games. I'll try to explain shit as I go. (although i highly rec the games because Rapture is a gorgeous place)
> 
> title from the [main theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp6QpMWaKpE) of the first Bioshock

Rapture is the perfect utopia. The world above descends into chaos and anger and frustration, so Andrew Ryan takes the rich and the imaginative and the crazy and creates a city underwater. Rapture is the shining jewel of the sea, only for those who dreams and only for those with enough money in their pockets. No gods exist under the sea, no kings to watch over the people. Just Andrew Ryan, a great man in his mansion and the artists filling up museums and art galleries and parks with their imaginations. 

 

Hank Anderson, fourty-nine, finds his way to Rapture almost entirely by accident. Of course he has heard the rumours, wondered what’s behind the disappearance of the business tycoon Andrew Ryan, listened to the whispers of Rapture, the jewel of the sea. 

 

But stories are just stories and Hank is most of all, a man of few stories, some action and a taste for whiskey and cigars. He’s been a detective for his precinct for the past twenty years, has seen his share of ups and downs, rescues and failed missions. The criminals of his city know his name and spit it out with venom and hatred that Hank swallows and lets seep into his skin. Hank tries his hand in an engagement but she isn’t right, not at all. She is sharp where he is soft, soft when he is hard. She is fire when he is nothing but ice, growing older and colder and lonelier. So she leaves him in the night, in the arm of a former friend. 

 

Hank snaps his suspenders, smokes more cigars and begins expanding his little tinkering hobby into a daily thing. 

 

He works, he detects, places criminals behind bars, stares down the barrel at a gun. Hank’s old car rattles and screeches and wheezes, much like him on the bad mornings. Hank stares at himself in the mirror in the crisp mornings and finds grey where there used to be black. 

 

That is the life he leads: Hank Anderson, Lieutenant, fourty years of life behind himself and more to come. 

 

He’s fourty-four when his career finally catches him by the throat - literally - and turns his leg into a useless piece of crap. No matter what the doctors say, what his colleagues say, he still goes to work, the stubborn asshole that he is. He limps his way through paperwork and evening drinks and lets a few salty, bitter tears slip. 

The truth is, they don’t want him anymore. He can’t chase down criminals with a busted leg, supported by a black brace. He can’t chase down a single thing like this.

 

He builds a little workshop in his garage, turns the shreds of his failed marriage and failed career into shimmering metal and glittering gold. Loneliness claws at him, rips his throat to shreds and digs through his brain matter, pushes aside the glowing happy years and instead turns him into a black hole. 

 

So he tinkers. He creates his own sort of art, he creates little machines that clink and clank and blink at him with eyes lacking in pupils. They’re not quite companions, but to them he talks during the worst nights. 

 

He still bothers his commanders and captains with phone calls and letters, clanks his way to the police station and insists that they just can’t keep him out, they can’t toss him out like his twenty years of work meant nothing. 

 

But Hank Anderson is left jobless, purposeless, a drifter. He drinks, he smokes, he creates. Then he destroys, smashes his creations into little pieces because after all, they remain cold and too lifeless and they can’t answer him back. 

 

It’s one of those days, the worst kind of days that Hank begins creating something else. It’s the solitude that’s been digging its claws into him for weeks now, for months. The same kind that kills him, makes him wonder if he’ll see the light of the day each night. But he lives on, he begins with building legs. He builds slim hips, molds them out of metal and wood, nails nails nails to keep the joints moving. He works like a madman, ties back his greying hair and works on. There are no friends to call on after him, no relatives left alive after the wars. Just some leftover contacts from his detective days, some interested investors who buy the pieces off him. No one he can call beloved.

 

It’s just him and the beginning of a mechanical creature. 

 

To this being Hank talks.

 

“Should I maybe get a dog? What do you think?” 

 

The mechanical palm in Hank’s hands doesn’t so much as twitch. All the pieces are scattered around Hank’s workshop. It’s nothing gorgeous, just a larger version of the little wooden and metallic creatures Hank had tinkered with, the ones with too large eyes like fairies. If only he could blow life into them. Maybe this one is going to be just as useless as the rest of them, eyes unseeing, body unmoving. But Hank talks to his creation, builds up movable fingers, goes on to create long, beautiful arms, sheds a few tears over the metallic chassis. 

 

The creature is not in the image of anyone Hank knows. It’s just a face and body of a young man, features carefully carved out of wood and molded out of metal, golden and silver nails hammered into him to keep him in one piece. Hank creates the eyes out of broken jewellery, leftovers from the wife who didn’t believe in forever. The eyes are big and brown, they stare up in the ceiling. 

 

Hank attaches the head properly, aligns the long, knobbly spine where it belongs. Only magic would make this mechanical man work but here he is, beautiful and quiet. 

 

Hank’s breath hitches. He hides his face. “Why do I keep creating these things?” His hands shake when he lets them fall. He looks at the curve of the man’s nose, the deceitful softness of the lips, the thin lines of his mechanical boy’s joints and seams. There are gears inside of him, switches and cords, he’s chaos and calm, a mockery, an imitation of a human and Hank hates himself for creating him. 

 

But the face is beautiful, every curve of him created with love Hank didn’t know he had. Hank wants to smash him to pieces. 

 

“Should I name you?” Hank gets up and paces, lights a cigar, blows forest smells into his dusty workshop. “What the hell, I should. Should I destroy you?” Hank paces paces paces and trembles, looks at his creation once more. “What do I do with you?” Hank fiddles with one of his little hammers, the one he’s used when he’s smashed his creations before. 

 

But the mechanical young man lays still and silent like a corpse, pale and golden and gorgeous. Hank had known how to make the little ones move but they had only required some gears, a flash of power to their tiny joints. 

 

Would the same even work now? This one is as tall as Hank, with longer, smoother limbs, hairless and emotionless. 

 

Hank turns away from his creation and leaves him alone in his workshop. 

 

Hank reads the magazines, reads about artists, inventors vanishing, leaving behind cryptic messages of a lighthouse and of a man, of the ocean swallowing all of them whole, leaving this world for a better one. Hank tells this to his boy, props the young man up into a sitting position, places the smooth, gorgeous hands into the man’s lap. 

 

“Can you believe that?” Hank blows smoke into the ceiling, props himself up better next to his man. “Maybe I should go diving for this fucking miracle city too. Maybe they all just, I don’t fucking know, mass suicide or something.” 

 

The man has no words for him, as usual. Hank still brushes the smooth cheek, feels along the seam and the nails connecting the jaw to the cheek and the cheek to the forehead. “What should I call you?” Hank’s heart thuds and for second, for a mere blink of an eye, he almost sees a twitch of mechanical fingers and the first thump of an artificial heart. 

 

But there is nothing, not even a whisper. 

 

Hank Anderson is fourty-eight, a year away discovering Rapture, a year away from the jewel of the sea. Had he known what lays beyond the sea, maybe he would have left his mechanical man into the dreams where he belongs, maybe he would have pulled the unmoving, hard body against himself. 

 

“I’m pathetic,” Hank murmurs, one particularly bad night. “But I think I should call you Connor. You know? It means wise, apparently. And it’s the name of one of my favourite actors. Dumb, I know. But you won’t judge me.” 

 

Connor has no answer, just his eternal cold silence. 

 

Hank still hugs him, smooths his hands down Connor’s hard surfaces and goes to bed, alone. Maybe to dream about vanishing millionaires and cities laying in wait under the sea. Hank sleeps like the dead but in this dead sleep he sees  _ Connor, awake and standing, by Hank’s bed. In this dream, Connor has brown eyes and a smile of glittering gold and a face like an angel. In this dream, Connor says his name, softly. In this dream, Connor’s artificial heart beats, his hands are warm as he lays them on Hank’s cheeks.  _

 

_ “Hank,” Connor whispers and his voice is soft honey. “Take me to Rapture, Hank. It’s where I can be truly alive. It’s where you can be free. Hank. Please, Hank.” _

 

In this dream, Hank has no answer for Connor but Connor has a kiss for him, gently pressed on Hank’s forehead. 


	2. Rapture calls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank contemplates. Hank receives an invitation.

 

Connor has eyes made of glass and a hole where a heart should go. He is a mockery of a man, a human-shaped machine that Hank can’t breathe life into. But Hank loves him still. Perhaps Connor is merely a replacement for the family Hank has lost, a dream made fake flesh. It doesn’t matter. Connor is Hank’s silent little secret and this is why Hank keeps him under lock and key, safe from intruders, robbers, anyone with too much curiousity and too sticky fingers. Hank doesn’t presume much about his own value in the market so he leaves his door unlocked at night and drinks himself to stupor. 

 

Sometimes he contemplates hacking off his useless leg. 

 

Sometimes he contemplates the rolling sea under his favourite bridge. 

 

Sometimes - 

 

But he never goes there. He sits beside Connor and tinkers, murmurs in a soft voice like talking to a child. The electricity that Hank had harnessed to make his little figurines move isn’t enough to make Connor move. It wouldn’t be enough to make Connor look at him, actually look at him, with those brown glass eyes, staring ahead into nothingness.

 

There has to be something though, Hank has convinced himself of it. So he researches, uses his old police sources to his advantage, harasses a few old co-workers. There has to be something. Hank shapes Connor’s face lovingly in the privacy of his workshop, attaches wires and studs and bits and pieces to keep Connor’s long limbs in place. He has shiny silver on his jaw and metal for his legs, pieces that Hank had salvaged from Old Zlatko’s garbage yard. Connor’s left hand was a lucky find: Hank has no idea how to make Connor’s ashen skin anything resembling human skin, but the left arm, up from the elbow, is clearly something leftover from a carnival doll or an automaton. It has slender fingers, curled, like waiting for a hand to hold it. 

 

All the parts Hank salvages for Connor he cleans thoroughly before attaching. The eyes he had made himself, painted silky deep brown because brown eyes are what he likes. The hair is the most difficult, one of the most difficult ones so Hank leaves it completely. He’s proud of the way he’s made Connor so beautiful, a silent guardian of the lonely man’s workshop. 

 

“Are you alright?” One of Hank’s oldest friend, Jeffrey Fowler, his former boss, asks. They’re sitting by Hank’s porch and smoking cigs. Fowler never asks unless he’s serious about it so Hank grunts. He takes a mouthful of whiskey and gulps it down, only mildly enjoying the burn of it. He’s drunk a lot of these days. 

 

“Working on things,” Hank finally says. “Don’t worry your pretty head over it.” He aims the jab just right and makes Fowler guffaw. 

“Fuck you, you old fucker.”

“Fuck you right back,” Hank says. 

 

They share another drink. They smoke their cigs. The ocean glimmers in the sun and stays silent. 

 

Far, far away, the lighthouse sticks out from the distance and the light. It is a dark, sharp spike aiming at the sky. These days there is rarely a light in there. Hank watches it and for the first time ever, wonders if there is anyone to keep the light going. 

 

The days pass for Hank as usual: dull and dark and full of rumours. He hears more and more whispers of disappearances, outright murders, the ocean keeping all it can beneath its surface. Hank spends time at the nearby beach, a little pathetic stretch of land and gazes at the decrepit lighthouse. Whatever draws his attention there, he can’t tell. 

 

He tells Connor of it and of course, Connor has no answer.

 

Hank dreams of Connor, a Connor of flesh and blood and a beating heart. This Connor has a gentle voice and a goofy laughter and he tells Hank many things Hank has never heard in his life. But it is just a dream. Right? 

 

Hank dreams of Connor so often he disappoints himself when he wakes. His Connor is beautiful, of course and solid and real, but he can’t speak, can’t dream. The Connor in Hank’s dreams is wishful thinking. The Connor in front of him, made of spare parts and scrap metal and carefully carved wood, he is real. 

 

If Hank cries into his hands after a drunken nightmare in front of Connor, Connor will never judge him for it. 

 

Co-dependent on a lifeless automaton is not the way Hank thought he would end his days but here he is - increasingly frustrated with the echoing emptiness of his life, more drunken than sober these days. If only he hadn’t gotten kicked out of the force. If only Fowler would actually let him back. Being a cop is all Hank ever wanted to do. Even if his big clumsy hands have become surprisingly good with his tinkering, the things he makes can barely be sold for scraps and for the art collectors who love all things mismatched and odd. Still. He is not an artist, a creator, he's an inventor of useless little decorations and wood carvings. He is just a man, he is nearing his fifties and there is no place for him anywhere anymore. 

 

He keeps this to himself. He is a product of his time: men don’t share their secrets or their worries. Men keeps these things close to their hearts, under harsh lock and key. 

 

Except - 

 

“Shit, Con, you would probably get it.”

 

Connor’s heart is formed out of wires. There is no blood to keep him going. The shape of his skull is pleasing, the slight upturn of lips that Hank has lovingly carved. If only. If only. 

 

Hank splashes whiskey on Connor’s metal knees and spends a good amount of time rubbing it off. “What’s the fucking use of anything,” Hank grumbles, rubs the little grooves in the metal he hasn’t quite managed to smooth out. “Especially you. I should just take you to the scrapyard and toss you. I should just keep on making little figures, people seem to like those. What’s the fucking goddamn use.” 

 

Connor stares ahead with unseeing glass eyes.

 

Hank’s heart burns. 

 

**

**

 

Five weeks after Hank created Connor, Connor disappears.

 

**

 

Hank stumbles into his workshop after one very late night of drinking, out of his mind. He finds Connor’s usual spot empty: the wires attached to Connor’s skull and back hanging uselessly over the bench. There is no sign of a struggle, of footsteps. The door had been locked as usual. 

 

“C- Connor?” It’s useless to call out, Hank knows it, but the name still drops out of his lips. Connor couldn’t have walked out himself. Who did this? Who came here and took Connor? Nobody even knew of him. Hank had never let anyone into his workshop, not even Fowler or Ben, the two he could call his friends. 

 

Connor is Hank’s secret, a pretty half-man, half-machine and now he’s somewhere, taken, stolen. 

 

Hank wheezes and stumbles around his workshop, turns over tables and chairs and breaks a few of his little figurines, the ones without a breath of life in them. His tears are clammy and damp with stupid, useless tears. 

 

It takes his drunken, noisy mind a while before he notices the piece of paper. 

 

It lays on the floor, by Connor’s chair, clearly fluttered over there by Hank’s rambling and stumbling. It’s ripped from a notebook or a shopping list, an insignificant piece of paper that Hank would otherwise toss into the trash - except for the fact that his workshop is always meticulously cleaned. It’s a stark contrast to the mess the rest of Hank’s too large apartment is. 

 

So the note shouldn’t be there. 

 

It takes some shuffling and huffing, a few panicked wheezes to get it up from the floor. Hank flops down on Connor’s chair and unfolds it. The handwriting is neat, like out of a typewriter. 

 

_ Rapture calls, mister Anderson. Come to the lighthouse at dawn. Will you come and find me?  _

 

There is no signature. The handwriting isn’t anything Hank recognizes. Rapture? So the myth, the rumours are true? There is a city under the sea, a place for the artist and for the inventor to work without morals, without the police. 

 

Hank crumbles the note in his fist and takes a deep breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up, finally Rapture.


End file.
